This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2007.
Bitter about litter
I have to laugh at HRM’s new campaign against littering in the city. The campaign posters that I have seen mention that the average fine for littering in the city is $400.00 and that it costs HRM something like $2 million a year to clean this litter up.
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Take a step out of HRM for a min. Visit NY than talk to me about litter. Halifax is the cleanest city I have ever been to.
God help us if that’s the case…..
You idiot, you think because NYC is really dirty that Litter Bugged doesn;t have a point? NYC is definitely dirtier but also has 15 million more people. I think the point is that if the city really wants to clean the trash up why not spend some of that 2 million on actually physically picking up trash instead of telling us about it on the back of bus…which costs god knows how much. I really didn;t want to bring god into this.
Here’s an anecdote on the subject that might be interesting to some.I was in England ten or so years ago, having some of their famous “chips in newspaper”. I found myself with said newspaper, wondering how to dispose of it. The issue? No garbage cans, anywhere. Not a single public bin could I find.Then it hit me. There was no litter.Everywhere I looked, the streets were immaculate. There was not a strip of paper or a shred of plastic on the ground.I took the short trip back to the chip shop to drop off my trash, wondering how such a marvel could exist. It’s unlikely that there was no little anywhere in the country (I wasn’t in London at the time), but to this day, I ponder the difference between that place and this one.
I’m no Timmy’s addict, but at least I’m informed enough to know that Tim Horton’s has the most pro-active approach to going green-“er” (who else has 2 garbage cans in a drivethru??) If you want to complain, look no further than the Irvings, and they live in our own backyard.
CndDsy, ever been to ottawa?, there’s a reason they clean up that city, garbage and people tooi was at a council meeting one time where a certain councillor, lets call him steve, blurted out ‘you people…blah blah blah…. go pick up garbage and we’ll pay you for it’, i contacted him 3 times, once by email, then twice by telephone i left messages, he said he was really impressed with my enthusiam the first time then and then never returned my messages, what a typical lying scum politician assholepeople who flick their cig butts into the street are littering, not to mention disrespecting nature, here’s an idea, litter tax on cigarette packsthe difference ‘is it attitude’ is that people there are generally smarter and caring, its cool to not give a shit here yo, didn’t u know
the bottom line is littering is a choice. I found myself walking 8 blocks home with a dairy queen cup, choosing not to toss it on the ground, because HRM hasnt put a garbage bin ANYWHERE in my neighborhood. anyone can litter, not everyone can choose to hang on for 10 minutes until they get to their destination